How Akash Goel Built an AI Platform That Increases Hotel-Conversions 30% at ⅓ Traditional Cost

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. Let one idea from today shape what you do next. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Akash Goel, co-founder and CEO of Attica Global, a last mile sales and revenue management company.

that helps hotels grow faster. Founded in 2020, Attica Global built a platform that automates lead follow-up pricing and revenue management on top of Salesforce, enabling one sales manager to serve multiple properties and delivering results at roughly one third the cost of traditional staffing. His team serves hundreds of branded and independent hotels across the U.S., boosting revenues for some clients by 25 to 30%.

Akash brings a rich history in hospitality tech. He earned his engineering degree from IIT Bombay, then built and sold two startups, Handy Home and Able Plus. He later led global IoT projects at OYO and headed categories at Urban Company, guiding teams of more than 100 engineers. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency. Listen.

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our program puts more money into your company’s bank account. As an example, we recently helped a client increase net profits by $900 per employee per year. Results vary, but the consultation is free. See if you qualify today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, co-founder and CEO of Attica Global, Akash Goel. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Akash Goel (02:17)
Thank you for having me.

Anthony Codispoti (02:22)
So Akash, I want to talk about one of your earlier companies that had a successful exit. Where did the idea to start Handy Home come from?

Akash Goel (02:33)
Yeah, back in the day, and this was in India, ⁓ Amazon and a company similar to Amazon, which is called Flipkart, it’s a very big company acquired by Walmart now in India, ⁓ really became successful. And that’s where an idea sparked that, there is an e-commerce giant for products, but maybe there is an opportunity to create a digital commerce giant for services as well, and specifically home services.

And that was really intriguing. was 23 years old at that time. you we were ⁓ a bunch of people who came together to formulate, you know, what this business might look like and sounded very exciting to us at that time. And that’s really what, you know, in one line sort of excited us to start that, hey, there should be a large digital commerce platform that connects home service providers with actual homeowners and might be a bigger opportunity.

And that’s how we started. We specifically launched one category, which is home appliances repair. So we were not multi category to begin with. We were just one single category when we started.

Anthony Codispoti (03:46)
And what was the geography that you were serving?

Akash Goel (03:49)
We expanded into more than 150 cities ⁓ in the first one year of our operations because we did not serve these homes ourselves. We onboarded existing home service providers. So these are appliance repair service providers that already existed. We onboarded them onto the platform ⁓ and then we got customers to book through us to them.

Anthony Codispoti (04:15)
So was the company based in India and then you were servicing 150 cities in the US?

Akash Goel (04:21)
no, this is, we are based in India, this completely Indian company, servicing clients in India. That’s right, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (04:26)
Okay, 150 cities in India that you were servicing.

And then eventually you sold the company, you exited. How did that process work?

Akash Goel (04:36)
⁓ Right, yeah. You one and half years into building Handy Home, we realized that, you know, this sort of a game, you need to be multi category for you to be successful. The cost of acquiring a customer is really high. And just with one service ⁓ that’s available on your platform, you don’t get repeat behavior enough to make enough money to even recover the cost of acquisition. By that time,

Urban Company had become decently successful in the same space, but instead of going category by category, they actually launched all categories together and they saw that early success. So when we started and when Urban Company started, nobody knew whether a vertical play would be more successful or a horizontal play would be more successful. It was only in hindsight that it was very clear how it’ll play out and everyone got funded, right? Back in the day. So when we realized that, you know, for our sort of a business,

the economics will never actually work out. We decided to find a home to whatever we had built by that time. And it was significant what we’d built. think the execution was really, really solid. It’s just that the business fundamentals weren’t great. And that’s how we sort of ⁓ decided to exit. And then Urban Collab was, of course, a very ⁓ obvious choice. We had common investors. ⁓ More importantly, ⁓

our service was something that was complimentary to what they were already doing. So I think it was just a very natural ⁓ marriage of that sort.

Anthony Codispoti (06:13)
Okay, so you were able to exit to this company, you went to join this company, maybe there was a little bit of a financial gain, but probably not setting you up for life. And then you came up with an idea for another company that you also had an exit from called Able Plus. Tell us about that.

Akash Goel (06:31)
Right. Yeah, that was right after ⁓ serving some time at Urban Company, which was also, you know, sort of a mandatory time post acquisition, right? ⁓ I think it was very clear to us that we want to continue building. I think that was apparent to me and Boney, who’s my co-founder at Able Plus and then at Adita. And that’s really what, you know, that hunger to keep building is what got us to really start Able Plus.

The idea of AblePlus was to sort of build deep tech automation products, which is called IoT in the sense that IoT is a field of deep tech automation. ⁓ And at that time it was really booming. Now it’s a little more common for all of us to see connected devices everywhere in our day-to-day lives. But at the time in 2015, it was not that common. And we thought that this is one area where a lot of

⁓ you know, success might come in not just for us, but for the consumers as well at handy home while looking at these appliances. We, we constantly thought that these appliances should be speaking with the cloud. If the AC is not working, they can communicate to the cloud and to the consumer that, Hey, I need a repair, right? But that connection didn’t exist. And that’s where I think the idea of Able to spark at some level that, that the connected devices have a very, very bright future.

And so I think it was a hunger of ⁓ wanting to build and that idea that the connected devices are the future. think that’s really where AMIDPLUS was born.

Anthony Codispoti (08:12)
And so you’re basically a service provider to IoT, connected devices. And the service that you’re providing is specifically what?

Akash Goel (08:23)
⁓ At Able Plus, what we did is we actually built these devices ourselves, right? We looked into a lot of industries, a lot of use cases where there is an opportunity to launch these connected devices. While the idea sparked with connected device in terms of home appliances, which is more B2C, when we started off, very quickly we went into more business use cases. So more B2B use cases.

For example, we work with the Indian Railways, which is a very giant organization, course, and Indian Railways is the second largest railway network in the world, ⁓ to really ⁓ get data from the running trains across the country on what is happening at the train. For example, if there is an increased vibration in the shock absorbing system of a carriage, it might lead to a fatal accident.

So the solution is that you put in a sensor and connect a GPS module with that sensor somewhere near the shock absorber so that you can sort of bring in that data to the cloud and to a dashboard that’s sitting in the operations division of the Indian Railways headquarters. And they can all of a sudden start seeing what’s happening with the mechanical integrity of a carriage. That’s just one use case that we worked on. We launched up MVP and it was successful. ⁓

The railway minister of India actually tweeted about it at the time. All the major publications in the country actually wrote about an ⁓ application like that, which was deployed in production, but at an MVP level. So we actually built the end-to-end technology and we deployed it.

Anthony Codispoti (10:10)
Okay.

And so how many different types of devices were you guys producing, manufacturing?

Akash Goel (10:19)
Right. think this is where things were really interesting for us. We actually built ⁓ sort of a platform in the sense that, irrespective of what the sensor is, what Able Plus could do is pull data onto the cloud and onto a visualization dashboard. And you can keep changing the sensors from maybe a vibration sensor to a temperature sensor to any sensor, anything that can sense any value.

doesn’t matter what that sensor is, we can pull that data, put in some analytics at the cloud level, and bring those insights onto your laptop or mobile. So we could very quickly go from Indian Railways to hospitality to retail to even ⁓ more consumer use cases. So within one year, we had our technology deployed across hospitality, retail, Indian Railways, more than a few use cases by that time.

and so on and so forth.

Anthony Codispoti (11:18)
And so what you guys were doing was sort of this platform that spoke with the existing devices. You weren’t manufacturing these monitoring devices. You were taking the readings from those, putting them into a dashboard so that the data is accessible and understandable to folks.

Akash Goel (11:36)
Yeah, so both. think if the sensors already exist, ⁓ we could pull the data from the existing sensors and bring it to the cloud. Or if the sensor did not exist, then we can bring in a sensor and put it on top of existing machinery. And both is possible. I think the biggest value was to bring in the data to the cloud and put some analytics on top of it so that you can derive insights. And all of a sudden, the machines are talking to you.

Anthony Codispoti (12:02)
And so what were some of the use cases in the hospitality field?

Akash Goel (12:07)
I think that’s one area where we saw the biggest success commercially. To give you an example, in India, you don’t know if a hotel room is actually sold or not as a brand owner. So think of a Marriott. And I’m not saying that Marriott faces the challenge, I’m just taking the example. A Marriott would have a hotel, let’s say in New Delhi, and their system says that maybe 60 % of the rooms are occupied.

But on the ground, maybe there are five additional rooms which are sold, but that was not put into the system. It’s because the front desk decided to not disclose that and keep that money for themselves. That happens a lot. ⁓ In the hospitality industry, it’s pretty common, right? Now, Marriott would lose a lot of revenue because 20 % of that or 10 % of that room revenue should be paid as royalty to Marriott, right?

There were several brands that we were working with in India who were losing more than $100 million in annual revenues. That was the extent of revenue leakage that was happening, right? So how do you know if a room is occupied or not? At massive scale, we’re talking about tens of thousands of rooms across the country. And so, you know, our platform is just very, very successful with that. What we did is that we put in a sensor that read the electricity consumption

in a particular room and at very high accuracy, reading the 24 hours of data, say that the room was occupied or not, right? And it would bring out or filter out the false positives like housekeeping or somebody can came in to do some sort of a repair for an hour or two, right? It would sort of flush those false positives out and very accurately tell you that no, this room was indeed occupied. So, know, obvious tells are

There was electricity consumption throughout the night. There was a spike because of the air conditioner on, which a housekeeper would typically not use. Things like that. But the value was, there is this current sensor that existed. And we traveled across China to find the right sensor, get that sensor customized to our use case, then hook that up with a Wi-Fi module, connect that with our cloud servers, put that analytics on top of it.

all that in a very human consumable way and bring that revenue back to the brand.

Anthony Codispoti (14:40)
So what does the sensor actually look like? Is there one being installed in every room?

Akash Goel (14:47)
Yes, that becomes a very important element to this entire game. Yes, we need to put in the device in every room. The installation at scale came down to around 15-20 minutes per room, right? But that really was required for this to happen.

Anthony Codispoti (15:05)
And it’s something that like the electrician has to open up the wall and like clamp it onto the, the power wires that are coming in, something like that. Okay. ⁓ and then what was the result for your clients?

Akash Goel (15:11)
Something like that. Yeah, something like that, yes.

⁓ It was really, really good and that ultimately led to the acquisition of Averplus by Oyo Rooms, which you ⁓ sort of mentioned while introducing me. They were one of the largest hospitality players in India and now one of the largest globally, of course. They just acquired G6 hospitality in the US for half a billion dollars, right? So they are a large player at the time they were facing this issue ⁓ not just in India, but across South Asia and Southeast Asia.

And our solution had proven results ⁓ at more than a few deployment case studies. ⁓ And it came to a point where a lot of the competition of OYO Rooms also wanted what we had. And OYO came in and just said that, you know what? We’re just going to acquire this technology because it’s too good. And that’s how we sort of got acquired by OYO Rooms.

Anthony Codispoti (16:11)
And Oya Rooms, a giant player in India, and you say now they’re also in the US, they just made a big acquisition of who was it again?

Akash Goel (16:16)
Yes.

G6 hospitality, you would have heard of Motel 6, the brand Motel 6 or Studio 6, right? They have around 1500, 1600 hotels across the US. They purchased this from Blackstone for half a billion dollars.

Anthony Codispoti (16:21)
Okay. Sure.

Okay, fascinating. And then I’m sure that you had to stay on for some period of time to help with the transition. But at some point you decide, hey, I want to build again, and you come up with a new idea. Where does this idea come from?

Akash Goel (16:48)
Right, yeah, think Able Plus is where we really got deep into hospitality. I think we traveled across multiple cities ⁓ in the country while deploying those sensors. And then at OYO, we spent almost three years ⁓ building various technologies, even beyond IoT, for more than four continents and 15 countries in a span of three years, right? This is where I think we traveled a lot across ⁓ the US, China.

⁓ Japan, India, UK, and then we saw hospitality ⁓ at massive scale globally. And I think somewhere there we realized what are these obvious gaps ⁓ that exist in this industry worldwide. And that’s when I think, ⁓ you know, in fact, we thought of more than a few opportunities when we were ready to start up again post-COVID. But yeah, I think it was during our time at Able Plus and OYO.

where we thought that whatever we’re doing at Attica right now is a massive opportunity.

Anthony Codispoti (17:54)
And specifically, the opportunity is what? What are you guys doing? ⁓

Akash Goel (18:00)
Right. See, at a very high level, I think this is very interesting, at a very high level, small and medium business operators, right, they work very hard, but they lack the tools and the skill set to become very, very successful. Enterprise today has those tools or has the team that have the skill set to be commercially successful in a digital first world. For example,

Somebody wants to run ads on Google, right? So you should be able to know how to operate the AdWords platform by Google, right? Now you would imagine that it’s pretty easy. I can do that. If I were to, you know, own a beauty salon, I would run ads myself because I’ve tried doing it. It is fairly easy. But SMB is juggling between so many things operationally, financially, that they A, do not have the bandwidth.

Or you would realize that a lot of these people actually get very overwhelmed by even just logging into a platform like that and setting things up so they don’t have the skill set to do it as well. Right. And they definitely cannot afford a dedicated digital marketing person, which Amazon can write or a Nike can. So what we realized by traveling across the world and talking to these hotel owners is that these are very hardworking people, but they fundamentally don’t know

what it takes to be successful in the digital first world. In hospitality, digital first world looks like booking.com, Expedia. You should have an idea of what your photos should look like. What should be the sequencing of these photos? What does 100 % content score really mean? That means that your profile should be full on booking.com because people might want to know if there is wheelchair accessibility or not. And if you don’t put in that information, somebody filters out

You know, just wheelchair accessible hotels, you don’t show up, right? Small things matter. So there is so much that goes into ranking on booking.com or Google or all these digital platforms. ⁓ For you to win, you need to be very successful. And then there is revenue management. How do you change your ⁓ nightly room rates every day? You know, how do you study your competition rates? How do you know your demand? ⁓

that is forecasted for a particular week and then, you know, so on and so forth, right? To have a very educated view on how you should rate your inventory for the next 15 days, let’s say, right? So it is this gap, right? Can we bring in the tools and the skill set that the enterprise has, but give that to a small or a medium sized business? That is a massive opportunity. And we’re doing that for hospitality.

Anthony Codispoti (20:52)
And so is your approach to use technology and automate all of these things for your clients? Or is this, you’ve got somebody hands on who’s doing this for the client every day or walking them through it.

Akash Goel (21:07)
Yeah. Our approach is that, we are your last mile partners, right? We may use a lot of technology and a lot of automation and data science on the backend, but we are going to deliver those dollars into your bank account, right? That’s our promise. So we are a last mile service provider, right? We are not a tool. And that’s very important, ⁓ is because these SMBs, they are not looking for another tool.

The reality is that the Marriott or Hilton today would actually give them all the tools that are necessary. All these brands have done a great job in making sure that the tech stack is really holistic. ⁓ What they don’t have is the bandwidth. What they don’t have is the skill set or the affordability to hire a person who can operate on top of the tool. So they don’t need a tool. The gap is in the tool. The gap is the person who will operate.

the tool to bring in that dollar into the bank account. So you might be able to, and really commercially as well, you might be able to sell that tool for let’s say $300 or $400 per hotel per month. But the last mile service, you can charge five times the money and they’ll be very happy to pay. So the 10 % or 15 % human layer on the top actually gets you four or five X more value also.

Anthony Codispoti (22:35)
⁓ interesting. So where some of your, and I’m to use the word competitors and you may not even think of that way, but some of your competitors, they’re offering the tool or in many cases you’re saying, Hey, Marriott’s already offered the tool. That’s not the problem. What they need is somebody to do the execution. They need somebody with the skillset that there’s that small gap in there, but I’m holding up my finger and it’s an inch, but it might as well be a mile because if you’re stuck on the other side of it, you’re not getting to the results.

Akash Goel (22:52)
That’s right.

Anthony Codispoti (23:04)
⁓ on the other side.

Akash Goel (23:06)
That’s right. I think the gap is massive, right? And once you bridge that gap, the value is immense. ⁓ And we’ve seen that with more than a few hundred cases now. And this is true for, I would say, three, four million SMBs that exist in USA today. It is a common unified problem that all most SMBs would face.

Anthony Codispoti (23:32)
So and let’s talk more about this because I know with your first two startups that we talked about the focus was more on India. So now with ⁓ Attica Global is the focus on India and the US just the US just India. Where are we?

Akash Goel (23:48)
We are now a 100 % US focused company with our technology and data science and everything being built by our team in India. But really we are helping the SMBs here in the US right now.

Anthony Codispoti (24:00)
Okay. And I threw out a stat in the intro. I need to go back to it. What are we saying that using your services is roughly one third the cost of traditional staffing? Is that because a lot of the support team is in India?

Akash Goel (24:18)
⁓ Not just that, think, I think biggest value is the automation that that we bring in, right? To give you an example, if you have a human do the sales management at a hotel, right? That person will take a lot of time to let’s say if there is a sales inquiry from a sports coach who is coming in with the entire team, they need 15 rooms for five nights, right? So they reach out to the sales manager of the hotel saying that, hey, what deal can you offer?

because I’m bringing in this group of business. So a sales manager would take that email, go into all the reports to figure out, is the quotation that I can offer, then write that email, make a PDF contract. Everything is manual. So they’ll take a few hours just to reply to that lead. Versus with technology, you can have a

you know, sort of a small data science module, calculate the quotation really, really well, right? Have automation that can bring in that PDF contract, have LLMs, which is AI, write that email as a reply, have Salesforce on the backend as your core CRM, right? Everything working together in harmony. The same, so the same inquiry comes in and you’re able to reply that within 30 seconds, right? Versus a few hours. That’s the…

That’s where the biggest efficiency gain is coming from.

Anthony Codispoti (25:48)
Got it. Okay. So it’s, it’s a combination of really sophisticated tech that’s helping to automate those things. And humans who understand what to do and how to help you and how to hold your hand.

Akash Goel (26:02)
That’s right. See, the humans here are more taking care of the creative part. We can have those humans here in the US and India, anywhere in the world. I think we’ll still be able to offer that price point, third the cost, right? ⁓ Because the most efficiency gain is coming in because of technology.

Anthony Codispoti (26:23)
Yeah. And what you’re saying about that tech being able to respond so quickly, it’s a huge difference maker, right? Because if I’m the person who’s sending that inquiry, I’m not just sending it to you, right? I’m sending it to four or five, six different places in the area. And part of my decision is going to be based on cost. But also, like, I’m in a hurry. Like, I need to get this booked. Who gets back to me first? And that’s where your software can come in, because it’s like within, I don’t know, minutes, maybe seconds, they get that reply.

Akash Goel (26:52)
That’s right. See hotels today and this is more relevant for the hotel industry. We are really selling a commodity. Every room looks and feels the same, whether it’s a Hampton by Hilton or a Fairfield by Marriott, it’s essentially the same box. So what matters is that turnaround time, which you said, how quickly are we able to respond to that lead and how ⁓ sane is your quotation. We’ve seen some sales managers in the market

reply very aggressively. They’re asking for $200 per night where the rooms are being sold for $100 on the retail market, right? It just makes no sense. it’s a lot of nonsensical behavior also that we’ve seen in the market, which you can hard code to ensure that your systems don’t ⁓ behave like that. And then the money is also in the follow up, right? So once you’ve submitted the code with AI today, you can actually then start following up as well.

in a completely autonomous way, which a couple of years ago was still more theoretical, but today it’s happening in our company. So we are able to follow up twice, thrice, five times in a set cadence so as to also be the most aggressive ⁓ sort of sales management practice, have the most aggressive sales management practice in order to sort of follow up the lead and close it.

Anthony Codispoti (28:16)
that follow up look like? it really AI driven or is it more of like an autoresponder that, you know, if they haven’t replied, send them this canned message?

Akash Goel (28:26)
It’s actually pretty smart. And I’m amazed myself how far we’ve come along. I think every single lead has a very contextual follow-up mechanism. So what happens is the lead comes in, and the entry happens in the CRM, which is Salesforce in our case. And then we would sort of submit the quotation, write that introductory email. That gets added on top of

you know, sort of the lead progression in the same lead. Basically, it’s more more context that gets added in the lead inside the Salesforce. Now, if we don’t hear back from them, right, the system would sort of send a follow up automatically in, let’s say, one day’s time. The first follow up goes within one day. If they ask a few clarification questions that, do you have airport shuttles or whatnot? All of that basically gets stored in Salesforce and it keeps building the context.

Now AI is reading all of that, right? It had its guardrails and it has its SOP and it will take a decision to follow up based on everything that it reads as the context on Salesforce for that lead, right? So nothing is hard coded and every lead has a very different follow up cadence depending on what has happened in that lead. It has come to a point that even the phone calls that we do

Let’s the sports coach is the example that we took, right? So there might be a phone call that happens between my sales manager and the sports coach. That phone call is transcribed and also stored as part of the same lead. So everything gets added as part of the context from the lead as well. So the sports coach was very, very keen on having, let’s say early breakfast. And that was mentioned in that phone call. One of our follow-up emails will highlight that, that we have confirmed early breakfast for you.

And our conversions are through the roof because of this technology.

Anthony Codispoti (30:28)
Can you say more about the conversion rates before the tech, after the tech?

Akash Goel (30:34)
Yeah, this is one thing where, you know, me or anyone will not be able to comment this because every single source of lead has a very different conversion percentage. For example, if you get a lead that came in at your front desk, somebody actually called your hotel for a sales inquiry, the conversion can be as high as 50 % because the intent of the lead is very high. But if a lead came in through a brand website, so somebody went to mario.com and just put in that lead and it’s sort of

to it, know, you. The conversions are typically two or three percent, right? So we have six, seven different channels where the leads come from. So every channel has a different conversion percentage. What we’ve seen is a 20, 30 percent jump in conversion in some of our main channels because of this tech. it’s all three things combined. We are able to respond very quickly, right? So we are the first ones to

⁓ you know, sort of reply back to that lead. ⁓ Our quotations are not ridiculous, right? We are ensuring that with this automation and third, we are following up more religiously, right? We never miss a follow up, let’s just say that. And I think these three things combined, ⁓ it’s not rocket science. You do these three things properly, you will see higher conversions.

Anthony Codispoti (32:00)
20 to 30 % is huge, Akash. mean, in the online space, and this isn’t fully online, but a lot, know, people are turning dials trying to get a percent, 2%, or a fraction of a percent increase. I mean, 20 to 30 % is a game changer.

Akash Goel (32:18)
Yeah, if a typical mid-scale hotel, let’s say, does $2 million in annual revenue, their sales management, the revenue that comes in because of sales would be, let’s say, 20%. So that’s $40,000. So we are looking at a 20 % or 30 % jump on that. It can lead to $100,000 also, a 25%.

good revenue, $100,000 for SMB additional revenue, a lot of that flows into their bottom line. It’s because their expenses are already paid for. In the hotel business, your X percentage of occupancy is pure profit. Because your debt is taken care of, your salaries are taken care of, your incremental utilities cost is not that much. ⁓ So it’s of a huge value to that business owner.

Anthony Codispoti (33:14)
I wonder if we can talk about, without mentioning any aims, a specific client, what their before situation was like, and then what it’s like while they’re working with Attica.

Akash Goel (33:26)
⁓

I think it’s pretty much the same for most of these business owners. ⁓ Before we come in, think ⁓ they would know somewhere that their sales leads are coming in and they would trust the GMs to respond to those leads. But they would know somewhere that, you know, that response is ⁓ not timely.

right? The quotation may be good, may not be good, but they’re okay with that, right? ⁓ They would assume that their booking.com or Expedia profiles are really, really good is because the brands would have taken care of it. They wouldn’t even know that there is actually a huge gap that exists in these digital channels, which is hurting their ranking, right? ⁓ Their reviews are coming in, but they

don’t have a very good sense of what people are complaining about. They would read certain negative reviews from time to time, but it’s not that they’re on top of it on a weekly basis. So that’s the situation before we come in. When we come in, I think after, let’s say, two or three months, it becomes very clear to them that there are at least four times more sales inquiries.

that they were receiving that they didn’t even know about. They didn’t even know about three channels that existed, which gets them those RFPs, which are these B2B sales leads. ⁓ The brands actually gave them access to those channels, but they never logged in. Or maybe they logged in at the start, but they never actually addressed those leads. ⁓ They didn’t have a single view of how many leads came in, how many did we…

respond to and how many did we reject because there are some leads that you don’t want to sort of take forward, right? And then what was your conversion percentage like? They had no data points whatsoever. On the digital front as well, they didn’t know what their ranking is typically. If somebody searches for a hotel near, let’s say, DFW, right? They don’t know if they’re ranking in the first page or not. They never checked. didn’t know. They didn’t know that that’s a thing, right? So we sort of highlight that and we

bring their ranking up and there is a clear incremental revenue on the digital front and similarly on other areas as well. So I think before and after, think there’s a huge education that happens. There’s a lot of these, ⁓ I didn’t know this existed. ⁓ now I know that this matters. And that’s why what we’ve seen is

60 % of the growth that we’re seeing today is purely referrals and expansions, organic in that sense. Somebody gave us their first hotel, they onboard their second and third, and we have clients who have given us their 10th and 15th and 20th hotel. These are obviously not SMBs now because they are worth half a billion dollars or $40 billion in asset value. And then they would call up their friends and

connections, whoever is asking them, what are you doing for sales and marketing? And they would just send those clients our way.

Anthony Codispoti (36:57)
So Akash, it strikes me as I’m listening to you that you are and your tool, Attica, it’s an example of AI that is not replacing a person, right? Because this is where a lot of the fear around AI is, it’s going to take our jobs. But you’re filling in the gaps that ⁓ people weren’t able to attend to in the first place because, like the general manager, he’s busy dealing with the staff.

He’s busy dealing with a guest issue or something with building maintenance. And he just, he didn’t know. He didn’t even know that there was a channel for some of these other things. He didn’t have time to get to the leads in a timely manner. And so you’re helping to fill in those gaps so that the property can maximize its revenue potential while still allowing for all the frontline people to interact with the guests, human to human.

Akash Goel (37:52)
Yeah, yeah, most of our clients did not hire any sales manager before us. And it’s not that because we came on board, they deferred the plan of hiring somebody, right? ⁓ So in that sense, there is absolutely no job loss that happened, not a single one. It says that they expected the GM or they expected themselves to do certain activities. But now, of course, there is somebody else doing it, which is software, NEI, right?

But to your point, there are larger hotels where there might be, let’s say, five sales managers. And as these AI-led autonomous workflows sort of penetrate deeper into hospitality or across industries, I think the same hotel may do similar or even better revenues with maybe three sales managers instead of five.

that might happen.

Anthony Codispoti (38:53)
Okay, got it. You seem like you’re pretty dialed in on AI capabilities as your tool is obviously leveraging a lot of them. What can you share with the audience that might be insightful to them how they might be able to leverage it in their lives?

Akash Goel (39:12)
I think for entrepreneurs, it’s really a massive tool, As an entrepreneur,

You now have access to an army of colleagues or team members across all functions, whether HR, IT, ⁓ to digital marketing, sales, ⁓ operations. Think of a mid-sized company that has a hundred member team. Now you are a young entrepreneur.

maybe just five member team, but you might have similar capabilities. And that is just fascinating, right? You don’t have to be a very large company to have a large team working for you. If you’re smart, you can actually put a lot of these LLMs to ⁓ your advantage to work, right? ⁓ They can be scouting for new leads.

They might be, they can be replying to those leads. They might be ⁓ useful in reaching out to your employees and asking them how they’re doing, right? Instead of HR doing that manually. And I can just go on and on about how much of this executive work can actually be automated ⁓ with AI. So for a young entrepreneur or a person who’s running a smaller company, think ⁓ they get

a fighting chance to really, really grow fast without the resources that they have. And for consumers, think overall, right, for smaller businesses or consumers, think it’s the same thing. You have capability, you think of it as an intern who has a PhD in almost everything and is available to you 24-7. So if you have an intern,

that needs micromanaging but has PhD in everything. You so you just go wild, you do what you want. And I just keep thinking about that in every aspect of life.

Anthony Codispoti (41:33)
So obviously your tool is helping out the hotel industry in pretty significant ways. We also have a lot of restaurant owners on this show. Can you maybe spitball a couple of ideas on how small to medium size ⁓ restaurant chain might leverage AI?

Akash Goel (41:49)
Yeah.

Yeah. Interestingly, we do have five restaurants who are actually now on board and on our platform with our solution. It’s because a lot of these hotel owners also owned restaurants and they wanted us to try it out. And we are live in, five restaurants in New Jersey, Pennsylvania area. And the results are great. To give you a couple of examples how restaurants have similar gaps and a solution like this can be helpful.

is that a local SEO is big for them, right? People search for restaurants near me on Google or Google Maps and everything is about ranking. Right? So a lot of restaurant owners in my experience may also find SEO very overwhelming. Right? And a lot of agencies are out there, but it’s not very effective. So they need somebody who can bring in that last mile

⁓ SEO ranking, right? Not just a tool. So it’s again the same gap. LLM can help you in that, but what you need is local SEO in order to start ranking on top of it. And then if you have marketing budget, you can start running ads as well. So that you come as a sponsored listing on top and they can really boost your revenue. ⁓ There’s a significant amount of revenues that you do from

food delivery apps like Doordash or Uber Eats, right? Now, winning on those platform also needs a lot of hard work because if you search for a restaurant on these platforms, there’s just so many restaurants that come in, right? If you’re in New York City or in Dallas or any of these cities, right? ⁓ So how do you rank on the top? That’s a classic digital marketing game, right? So that’s the second big aspect of it, which is food delivery. It can be 30 % of your total revenues.

And the third big aspect is sales, which is in this case, catering sales. So you can be serving those six, $700 of big catering needs. So if I were to draw parallel to hotel, it’s exactly the same. It’s local SEO for your walk-in customers. It’s digital for your

Anthony Codispoti (44:04)
Interesting.

Akash Goel (44:16)
delivery business, which is significant. And then there’s B2B catering sales as well, right? ⁓ So we realized that at the end of the day, the gap is the same. It’s the SMB wanting to do more, but is limited and you have to serve them.

Anthony Codispoti (44:34)
And without giving away your secret sauce, Akash, how are you helping a restaurant improve their rankings in a door dash or on Google searches or Yelp or whatever the platform is?

Akash Goel (44:47)
Right, so I think every platform ultimately will have the same fundamentals, ⁓ Whether it’s booking.com or it’s Google or it’s Doe Dash. It’s really about the ranking algorithm. And the ranking algorithm is all backed on the same principle. The principle is sell more of whatever is already selling. Okay? That’s what SEO is, essentially.

If somebody searches for the best skin cream for me or whatever, right? The website that comes on the top is the website that is most loved, right? So Google is basically selling what is already most sold, right? That’s SEO. Similarly, booking.com will keep putting in that Marriott, which is the highest ranking, which everyone keeps on booking, right? It’s because booking.com would think that that’s the best way of serving my customer, to give them what’s the best out there, right at the top. And same is true for Doordash.

So once you know this principle, you will realize that you need to rank on the top once. And that’s the tough part. But once you’re already on the top, it is comparatively easier to stay on the top. So how do you get on the top? Maybe inorganically, right? So putting that money as boosters, you know, to start off with that can be one way. Or inorganically can be, or organically can be, you know, making sure that you have all the right keywords.

⁓ You know, your photos are perfect. Your reputation is top notch, right? So that you can slowly build on that ranking. just a small glimpse of how we do it, but there is a lot more nuance to it, you know, and there is that weekly execution that goes behind ⁓ improving those as well.

Anthony Codispoti (46:25)
Yeah.

And so you see restaurants as being the next playground that you guys want to go play in,

Akash Goel (46:42)
We’re sort of trying our hands with the restaurants, honestly. We’ve not taken a big decision. Hospitality is a massive space, honestly. And it’s not just the US, right? I think the entire, you know, all the countries in Europe, there’s of course Canada, there’s the Middle East, which is…

which is the fastest growing hospitality market in the world right now. Saudi Arabia, for example, grew 80 % year on year last year. 80 % practically doubled, right? The entire hospitality market practically doubled in one year. That’s unprecedented growth. While US hospitality is actually growing two to 3 % year on year. So it’s pretty much flatlined in that sense. But that’s most mature markets are like that. So I think we are more excited about

taking this ⁓ global beyond US, ⁓ then go multi-industry. But really, ⁓ this is an opportunity.

Anthony Codispoti (47:49)
At the same time, follow

what your customers are asking for, And so you got a customer that asked for restaurant help and you guys went there.

Akash Goel (47:57)
Honestly, we did try that out with this limited few restaurants also because we wanted to prove to ourselves that this can actually have an application multi-industry. ⁓ But will we take those five restaurants to 15 just because our existing customers want us to serve that? I don’t think we’ll do that right now.

Anthony Codispoti (48:19)
Okay, you want to stay

laser focused on the hotel space.

Akash Goel (48:23)
That’s January 2026, yes.

Anthony Codispoti (48:26)
Yes. And so that’s the answer for January 2026. Things can always change. And so what is the plan going forward? How do you guys add some rocket fuel to this?

Akash Goel (48:37)
⁓ I think for us to go to wherever we are to 10x the scale, think just US hotel industry is big enough, right? So even if we just keep repeating what we’re doing, I think we are good. And then if I were to put my enterprising hat on to say what additional ⁓

know sort of active enterprising can we do that would be taking it to a few more countries. I think that that’s the next big step for us.

Anthony Codispoti (49:15)
And so as we talk in January 2026, focusing on the US market, who’s an ideal fit? ⁓ Like how many independent units do they have? How many keys? What’s your sort of threshold?

Akash Goel (49:31)
⁓ Typically we’d serve hotel owners who would own, let’s say, 10 hotels or lesser. ⁓ So anyone who has one hotel up to 10 hotels, anyone more than 10 hotels would have their own team. So now they can afford those tools and can afford people operating those tools. ⁓ We would not do very small hotels, 20 rooms or below.

So typically, know, sort of 60 to 150 rooms, that sort of a size of a hotel should find a lot of value from our solution.

Anthony Codispoti (50:14)
You know, Aakash, in my experience, ⁓ behind pretty much every success story there is usually a part of it where ⁓ it almost broke somebody. I’m curious if you can share a serious challenge that you’ve gone through, personal and professional, and what you learned from it.

Akash Goel (50:36)
Yeah, think zero to one, the journey, right? It’s overly glorified. think zero to one is very painful. And the roller coaster ride is real. I think there are years of self-doubt. ⁓ There are way too many lows before maybe one high. ⁓

So think that emotional turmoil is very, very real. And I don’t know why zero to one journey at a startup is so glorified. Specifically, I think what has been very challenging for me ⁓ has been across Able Plus as well as Attica. I think ⁓ just to have, ⁓ like for example, my wife also subscribed to this. ⁓

journey with me, which honestly is a game that I decided to play and she did not. But ⁓ she has been asked to face the challenges that came along with this journey without she really being passionate about it. So I think ⁓ it has been challenging for her and me in that sense. then specifically, think financially, given the decision that we’ve taken, we did not

raised large VC rounds. We wanted to ownership in the company because we wanted to build and we are building for ultra long term. So early days without those VC dollars, it had been financially very, very tough for us. And in fact, I went broke while building Able Plus, properly broke and while building Attica as well. There was a time where the bank balances were like

just ⁓ zero and then you sort of, know, ⁓ you know, sort of scrape your way to the next month. And we took those calls thinking long-term and now it’s paying off. But ⁓ those are really, really tough times, right? And sort of takes that glory away from ⁓ otherwise what people might think entrepreneurship is, you know, just such a fun game to play.

When you play it, you realize that it has a lot of challenges that you have to overcome. ⁓ So think for me specifically, it has been these two things where I think keeping my partner, you know, continue to subscribe to this journey and then also the emotional, the financial and emotional turmoil.

Anthony Codispoti (53:23)
Akash, can you take us to one of those times when you looked at your bank account and it was essentially at zero? Where does the next dollar come from? What are you thinking? How did you get from there to, I don’t know, buying groceries or making rent the next day?

Akash Goel (53:40)
Yeah, so.

I back in the day, I basically called my father, hey, can you help me out? Because I was comparatively still younger and I think it was not as shameful, Honestly. Right now at Attica, I think we were drawing some salary, right? So it came to a point where we were hand to mouth to the point that you notice

not a single dollar of discretionary expenditure was okay. Right. So it was not broken in the sense that, where are we going to buy groceries from? But it was more that, hey, you we are, we get a check and that goes to zero, ⁓ right before the end of the month. Right. And, and there is no room for any, any discretionary spend. Right. And, that was that for, for a few months. And, and then, you know, sort of the business took off, you sort of

start taking a little higher salary and then you sort of, know, climb your way out of that.

Anthony Codispoti (54:49)
And so with Attica, where was the moment where the business took off? What was that inflection point?

Akash Goel (54:56)
think for us, it was around, ⁓ you know, around 50 clients. think, ⁓ you know, somewhere around one and a half million dollars in annual recurring revenue. think that’s we ⁓ started to, you know, see a little extra dollars coming in to the bottom line that could serve at least the basic needs and then, you know, sort of also then

put that money back into the growth. And now, of course, it’s much better. Yeah. But the first 50 clients, yeah, I think that’s where ⁓ it was extremely, extremely challenging.

Anthony Codispoti (55:38)
Once you got to that point, perhaps there were some economies of scale that allowed you to take just a little bit more money from the company. Yeah.

Akash Goel (55:45)
Yeah,

because some basic ⁓ fixed costs that you would have, right? You definitely need these many software engineers. You definitely need sort of a HR person. You need that office. You need some basic staffing on the operations side. So that’s a fixed cost that we have, right? And then we need to support that. ⁓ And I think beyond that, you also know how the sales cycle works. You know where to get the leads from. So I think…

you know, from 50 to the 100, the time period was also far lesser, right? So you sort of escape very quickly. So I do agree to that saying, That zero to one is impossible. One to 10 is improbable. And then 10 to 100 is inevitable. So I did see this happen at least the first two parts. And then let’s see the third part.

Anthony Codispoti (56:40)
And any words of wisdom to share with the audience who is experiencing something similar in terms of managing the relationship with your spouse, your partner, who, you know, maybe they’re not wired the same way. They didn’t sign up for the roller coaster.

Akash Goel (56:55)
Yeah.

Yeah. I think.

I think ⁓ it’s very important to set the expectations upfront. think you need to be mature to set expectations with yourself, I think, first, and then set that expectation ⁓ with the partner upfront. And not the optimistic picture. think you can fairly assume that the journey is going to be more worse than the pessimistic ⁓ scenario that you paint when you’re starting off.

pessimistic scenario that you paint for yourself, the journey probably will be a notch, you know, a little more worse than that. And sort of if you can set that expectation upfront with your partner of that pessimistic, you know, picture and if they’re okay with that, then I think you’re solid. then second picture, yeah, right.

Anthony Codispoti (57:51)
So paint the worst possible picture that you can for them so that hopefully

anything that happens is above that. Sorry, go ahead.

Akash Goel (57:58)
Yeah,

yeah, because there’s going to be a lot of, hey, but we spoke about this and now you’re saying that you need, you know, a couple of more quarters and, and, and, and they’re right. Right. ⁓ You can’t blame them. ⁓ And I think the second big learning and a of, a lot of entrepreneurs have spoken about it is that ⁓ if you’re not, not doing the VC game, you do you sort of bootstrapping or you’re in a business that ⁓

doesn’t attract a lot of external funding, ⁓ then start up once you have at least maybe one year of personal burn ⁓ or maybe a couple of years of personal burn. think that helps quite a bit. Yeah, some savings because, right, and that helps you ⁓ not divert a lot from what you want to build because those short-term financial pressures can

Anthony Codispoti (58:40)
some savings, yeah, to help you kind of weather the storm.

Akash Goel (58:57)
⁓ force you to take certain short-term decisions might and that just alters the path ⁓ to something else altogether, right? ⁓ While you might be onto something huge. So if you had the financial questioning, I think it just helps in my experience.

Anthony Codispoti (59:15)
Akash, I’ve just got one more question for you today. But before I ask it, I want to do three quick things. First of all, anybody who wants to get in touch with Akash, you can reach him on LinkedIn Akash Goel, Attica Global Attica spelled with one T. I made that mistake a couple of times Attica spelled with one T. So Akash Goel, Attica Global, we’ll have the link in the show notes. Also, if you’re enjoying the show, a quick comment or review on your favorite podcast app goes a long way.

Akash Goel (59:22)
Mm-hmm.

Anthony Codispoti (59:43)
towards helping others discover our show. So thank you for taking a quick moment to do that right now. And as a reminder, if you want to get more hospitality employees access to therapists, doctors, and prescription meds that as paradoxical as it seems, actually increases your company’s net profits, reach out to us at addbackbenefits.com. So last question for you, Akash, a year from now, what’s one specific thing that you hope to be selling?

Akash Goel (1:00:14)
Right, I think.

⁓ I think on the personal side, it’s my wife and my daughter saying that my life is not just about Attica. I think I just want to hear that once. And that would sort of be ⁓ the indicator to say that I’m not as obsessed. sort of now balancing it better. Right. So think on the personal side, that’s my not star.

And on the, on the business side, I think I want to get to a point where, um, uh, 80 % of our customers are willing to wear a T-shirt, uh, when they’re going out to meet their friends. think just be that good and delivering value. think we at a point where I think 60 % of our customers would do that. Honestly. Um, that is always the good bad and the right, uh, you know, but.

get to 80 % plus and I think that would be one cause of celebration because we are growing for sure. think I’m giving a huge insight to whoever is watching. You you do something for SMBs today in the market. All VC dollars are flowing into enterprise or these larger companies, but SMBs are a massive, massive opportunity in the US today. It’s a free inside you do what you

want to do with that. So I think since we’re all in that board, I know that we’re going to grow. So it’s now about whether we build something that we are very, very proud of.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:00)
What’s one thing that you can do to get from that 60 % of t-shirt wearers to 80 %?

Akash Goel (1:02:08)
I think now we are at that point where the obsession needs to kick in, right? I think we’ve built the obvious elements of the solution ⁓ that gets us to a decent outcome. But now to become legendary, I think we need to start obsessing on those finer ⁓ details a little more. For example, you get a…

a inquiry for a special group request, right? And the reply cannot be a cookie cutter reply, right? How do you, you know, sort of a boring answer to the question, but it’s about those finer details and those corner cases and just go deeper, deeper, deeper to the point that you are just the absolute best.

Anthony Codispoti (1:03:03)
Love it. Akash Goel from Attica Global. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate you being here.

Akash Goel (1:03:12)
Thank you so much, Anthony, for having me. I love this conversation.

Anthony Codispoti (1:03:16)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.